About This Gigapan

MassiveBlack II is the smaller cousin of MassiveBlack, a cosmological simulation ran at NISC Kraken by Researchers at McWilliam Cosmology Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

In MassiveBlack II, 5.3 billion gas particles and 5.3 billion dark matter particles represents the baryon and dark matter in a cubic patch of the the universe 100 Mpc/h on one edge. WMAP7 cosmology is used.

Shown in the image is the temperature(color) and density(brightness) of the baryonic gas.

Although baryonic gas makes up a tiny fraction of the matter mass in the universe, it is more readily observable because it emits and absorbs light.

This larger box version of the visualizaion unfolds the cubic box into a rectangle of size 1100 Mpc/h x 620 Mpc/h.
Each pixel in the image represents a project area of 5kpc/h x 5kpc/h. Our galaxy will show up as an object of size about 4 pixels x 4pixels on this image.

The thinner line of sight depth means the most massive halos and super clusters of galaxies are chopped off and shows up several times in the image, as can be seen.

There is another version of the image where a thicker line of sight depth is used: